Climate Services for Resilient Development

A Worldwide Partnership for Climate Solutions and Sustainability

Every society throughout the world is facing growing climate-related risks that threaten assets, livelihoods, and overall well-being. These challenges are especially pressing in developing nations, where vulnerability to climate-related impacts is comparatively high and coping capacity very often is low. Inability to manage the risks—from rising sea level to extreme weather events—hinders the world's most vulnerable populations from achieving and protecting development gains.

In an effort to bolster developing countries' resilience to climate variability, public and private institutions have partnered to build Climate Services for Resilient Development (CSRD). Led by the US government, this international partnership brings together financial investments, information resources, tools, and training to help at-risk nations prepare for and adapt to the changing planet.

At the core of the group's commitment is delivering climate services—including the production, translation, transfer, and use of climate information—purposefully designed to enable policymakers and decision-makers to address significant problems and create solutions. Toward this end, CSRD will promote services that are user-centric and collaborative and effectively harness the power of information, technology, and innovation from around the world.

The CSRD initiative operates within a wide sphere of climate services programs being developed internationally, many in coordination with the Framework for Climate Services (GFCS). CSRD's work will be advanced in this context and is intended to complement existing programs and contribute specifically to the implementation of the GFCS.

Climate Services

Guiding Climate-Smart Decisions, Policies, and Planning

The key to building climate resilience is to develop the means to assess potential impacts of climate changes (on all time scales) and to evaluate and exercise informed policy and decision options that minimize risks and maximize opportunities in each climate-sensitive arena. As solutions for coping with climate risks are developed across sectors, societies at large will increase their resilience and more consistently achieve development gains. By delivering climate services so purposed—facilitating the sharing, translation, transfer, and uptake of authoritative climate information—the CSRD partnership will help guide sustainable development in participating countries.